Glossary · Agents & tools
Tool Contract
The complete agreement for a tool boundary: purpose, typed inputs, outputs, validation, permissions, side effects, errors, timeouts, idempotency, and evidence returned to the caller.
Why it matters
A schema tells a model what fields exist; a contract tells the system when the tool is safe and how failures must be handled.
In practice
Define a file-write tool with an allowed root, expected base revision, maximum size, dry-run mode, explicit conflict errors, and a returned patch hash.
Common confusion
A JSON Schema is part of a tool contract, not the whole contract.
Related terms
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